Time controls

The right side of the main compressor panel holds the controls that shape how smoothly the gain change signal responds and how its curve is formed, along with the wet/dry mixing controls.

• The Attack knob controls how quickly compression engages, sweeping from 0.005 ms (very fast) up to 250 ms (very slow). With transient-rich program material such as drums, you'll want short attack times so that overshoot stays under control. On less percussive sources, however, attack times that are too brief can rob the sound of life or bring in audible distortion. Sonivex Grip reaches remarkably fast attack times, and those times are program-dependent.
• The Release knob determines how long the compressor needs to bounce back once gain reduction has been applied. Each of the compression styles in Grip 3 relies on its own release model, and in the majority of cases the release time is highly program-dependent. In practice this means Grip 3 springs back almost instantly after a transient, yet lets go far more gradually following sustained stretches of gain reduction. Note: When Auto Release is active, the Release knob scales the overall influence that the auto release feature has on the release time.
• The Auto Release button - the AUTO label sitting beside RELEASE - switches on an intelligent auto release feature. Once it's engaged, the compressor continually reshapes the release time according to how much gain reduction is happening at that moment, which layers in yet another kind of program-dependency. When Auto Release is used, the Release knob adjusts the overall effect that the auto release feature has on the release time.
• The Lookahead slider tells Grip 3 how far ahead in time to look when predicting peaks in the incoming audio. A touch of lookahead helps keep transients intact and makes the resulting gain reduction sound far more transparent. Since lookahead adds extra latency, you can turn it on or off across the board from the bottom bar using the Maximum Lookahead button. Clicking it lets you pick between Off and a range of settings, all the way up to a ceiling of 20 ms. That way you can enjoy the benefits of lookahead while keeping the total latency of your processing chain to a minimum.
• The Hold slider defines how long peaks in gain reduction are held before they are allowed to fall away. A small amount of hold time can make gain reduction sound more transparent, while stretching the hold out further lets you dial in pleasing pumping effects.
• The Wet Gain knob sets the level of the signal once it has passed through the compressor. It's commonly referred to as make-up gain, since it restores what the gain reduction took away. Surrounding the Wet Gain knob, the pan ring governs the balance between mid and side, which comes in handy whenever you're applying make-up gain after mid-only or side-only compression.

• With Auto Gain switched on - via the AUTO button next to GAIN - the plug-in applies make-up gain to the processed signal automatically, taking its cue from your current Threshold, Ratio, Knee and Attack settings. This lets you keep the perceived audio level steady as you move the controls around. The Auto Gain algorithm also understands mid-only and side-only processing, so if you happen to be compressing 100% mid-only, Auto Gain will boost only the mid signal and leave the side-signal exactly as it was.

  Keep in mind that the auto-gain algorithm never actually measures loudness in order to decide how much gain to add. It simply makes an educated guess, so in certain situations you may still want to fine-tune the output gain by hand.

• The Dry Gain knob decides how much of the dry, uncompressed input signal is blended back into the output. This technique is known as parallel compression: the dynamics of the dry signal stay intact while the compressed signal lends the overall tone extra body and character. The benefit is that the sound gains reinforcement exactly where it's wanted, all without any danger of crushing the peak transients.

Program-dependency

Every one of the compressor styles in Sonivex Grip 3 carries its own flavor of program-dependency, meaning the compressor responds in a distinct way to each type of input, or program material. Grip 3, for instance, recovers almost instantly from transients - those quick changes and peaks - but eases off considerably more slowly after extended spells of gain reduction. How program-dependent the attack and release times turn out to be will vary with the compression style you have selected.

Tips

• To dig deeper, read the Basic compressor controls article in our online Sonivex Learn tutorials.
• The Wet Gain and Dry Gain knobs are reverse-linked. Hold down the Alt key (the Shift key in some hosts) as you drag the Wet Gain downward, and the Dry gain will rise by exactly the same amount.

Next: Style and character

See Also
Dynamics controls
Using Sonivex Grip 3